Hear that? From Adele to Mantel, 2013 has been played out to the sound of women rising

We have come a long way since days when nobody would buy a girl band's records

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Here’s a curiosity. The Sunday Times’s deathlessly vulgar “Rich List” has declared the richest musicians in the country – Paul McCartney, Andrew Lloyd Webber and U2, to no one’s surprise. But, more interestingly, to indicate the direction that things are going in, it compiles a list of the richest performers under 30. A very clear tendency is apparent here. The male members of JLS and One Direction appear around the bottom of the top 10, with estimated fortunes of £5m and £6m. Higher positions, however, are entirely occupied by women. From the top, it runs Adele, Cheryl Cole, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua, Florence Welch, Charlotte Church, Jessie J, Lily Allen, Nadine Coyle and Duffy. Who is Duffy? Never mind. They have, the journalists estimate, from £6m (Duffy) to £30m (Adele). Good luck to them. But what has happened to male musicians?

It is hard to imagine that no young male performer can get to be
as popular as Florence Welch, but that does seem to be the case. We
have come a long way since the pre-Spice Girls days, when nobody,
it was said, would buy a girl band’s records. Two of this list owe
their success to Girls Aloud, and a third, Nicola Roberts, is up
there with the JLS boys. In the full list, a Spice Girl is in the
top five. There have always been spaces in popular culture for
divas like Leona Lewis, but they have always before competed with
male singers. Not any more, it seems. The only way for a man to
break through is as a member of a band. The audiences of those
ubiquitous TV talent shows will vote for a boy to win – think Steve
Brookstein, Leon Jackson, Joe McElderry – but will only buy the
records of girls. What we say we like, and what we actually like,
are two different things.

“Shall we have womanly times?” Ian McEwan wrote in a libretto
for Michael Berkeley in the 1980s. “Or shall we die?” McEwan was
writing about nuclear annihilation, and had the Greenham women in
mind rather than the womanly times which, in 1983, supplied a
female monarch and a female prime minister. But perhaps there are
more telling, less consciously aware signs that we start to move
into womanly times, and one of them might be the money that women
can make out of the esteem and enjoyment of the public. You reach
for your iPad, thinking “Oh yes, I enjoyed that”, and download
something. You are not likely to think “I want to download and
listen to a woman’s voice”, but a woman’s voice seems, without your
having to consider the matter, altogether more the thing.

People exclusively or predominantly want to hear the voices
of young women when they plug in their iPads

The same appears to be true in other areas. Of the generation of
Young British Artists from the 1990s, who is the one with genuine
staying power? Rachel Whiteread, whose new show at Gagosian opens
this week. In the list of bestselling books of 2012, it is true
that a minority – 43 out of 100 – are by women. But the proportion
changes in the upper echelons, with 14 out of the top 20. Here,
prizes and esteem reflect the change in culture. The Women’s Prize
was set up as the Orange Prize, to give women novelists a chance. This year, the Costa prizes were won in every
category by a woman writer, and Hilary Mantel swept the board
elsewhere. This week, the magazine Granta will announce its fourth list of young British
novelists since 1983. Previous lists have been made up of 30 per
cent or 40 per cent women writers. Times have changed. Will this
list be made up of an actual majority of women?

There is no doubt that women still suffer in other areas, such
as employment and promotion. It is easier for a woman to get on in
human rights and family law than in corporate law, in publishing
than in film-making, in singing rather than producing or composing.
But these seem to be lagging behind what people actually want,
rather than what they appear to think is good for society. If
people exclusively or predominantly want to hear the voices of
young women when they plug in their iPads, why would they not want
to hear the voices of women from the judge’s bench? In the week
when Mrs Thatcher died, might we not reflect that the ongoing
paucity of women’s voices in politics might not reflect what an
electorate might actually want – a woman’s voice speaking with
authority and knowledge?

For men, this might be hard to take. They have lost their
privilege, their elevated access to an audience, whether in the
courtroom, the boardroom, on stage or in the Houses of Parliament.
It feels like being disadvantaged, although in reality, in the
overwhelming majority of cases, the men are not even being asked to
compete on the same grounds as women. Their advantages are merely
being mildly examined.